Windows 2000 EOL, Farewell As An Era Ends

All versions of Windows 2000 (Professional and Server Editions) rolled to their absolute end of life last week on the 13th of July 2010. Not even paying for it will fetch support anymore for the venerable Windows 2000 – it is out of its Service Pack support dates, and “Extended support” phase.

It became available for public purchase on 31st March 2000 (GA or General Availability) and active support ended on 30th June 2005. The five years since, when it remained in “Extended support” was a reminder to users and businesses that the Operating System was on its way out and only very specific circumstances and customers were eligible for support. Its life-support was going to be pulled – while people were free to continue running it, they were not to expect any further updates to it whether for features or security. No new applications released by Microsoft after its “Mainstream Support” ended five years ago support Windows 2000.

Affectionately called Win2k by users, this OS presided over a period of great churning in the IT industry. It heralded the arrival of a significantly different approach to PCs – until Win2k, Workstation and Server OSes were treated differently. Such OSes were meant to naturally be drab but solid in nature, in contrast to glitzier “consumer” OSes (which meant Windows 95 and Windows 98 at the time) that could afford to be unstable. In contrast to the stolid Windows NT 4.0 workstation/server OS, Windows 2000 was quite an exciting OS to use. It ploughed the road for future versions by making stability a central requirement and thereby changing device drivers and applications for the better. This helped the next version (Windows XP) to deliver on the promise of uniting consumer and server OSes on a single codebase, enabling applications/hardware to be used inter-changeably on consumer/workstation/server editions. Ironically for all of its philosophy, Win NT4 had become quite problematic by the time Win2k released.

Originally Win2k (also known as NT 5.0) was supposed to have been released much earlier. Even until today, this delay stands out as one of the only two such extreme cases in the history of Microsoft Windows. It was the first such case (its predecessor NT4 was released in 1994) of a massive 6 year gap. The second such case of course, was Windows Vista which released in 2007, a cool 6 years after its predecessor Windows XP (which was released in 2001). The hardware requirements of Windows 2000 were quite high for its time, so most consumers stayed with Windows 98 (or 98 SE) and directly moved on to Windows XP. This accounts for the perception among much of the public, that there was a 4-5 year gap between mass consumer OSes - yes that was true between Win98 and WinXP but it is easy to discount the fact that MS had also released Win98SE, Win2k and WinME in this time-frame.

Please note that support for Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) also ended along with Windows 2000. Windows XP Professional has been out of Mainstream Support since the 14th of April 2009. Its Service Pack 3 avatar is still in the “Extended Support” phase though, until the 8th of April 2014 when even that will end.

It turns out that Microsoft’s “Support Lifecycle Policy” for its commercial products may even be better than the support periods offered by open-source Linux distro companies, although that could be a subject for debate. In Microsoft’s own words, “Support ends 24 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first. For more information, please see the service pack policy at http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/#ServicePackSupport”.